When I was a little girl, my mother had a book called Emily Post’s Etiquette. It’s still in print today in its eighteenth edition. It was the go-to resource for teaching proper behavior for everything from how to set the table correctly to how to introduce a guest at a party. It was the polite man’s guide to life, and I was raised by its social conventions.
Today, we are in desperate need of an etiquette manual for the internet. Some believe that social media is much like the wild west of old—anything and everything goes. It creates an energy and excitement that gives birth to creativity and collaboration. Unfortunately, that also means that civil behavior and professional standards are often overlooked. In our race to be first or gain more influence, we often overlook those who helped us find that important information to begin with.
Much has been made of late about plagiarism and stealing of information on the internet. It starts with the misunderstood idea that all information on the internet is public. Information is public, but it is not public domain. There is a difference. Everyone knows that plagiarism is wrong. But there is another layer of responsible behavior on social media that I’m not sure is accepted as common knowledge: the simple act of attribution.
Attribution, or giving the source of where you got the information you are posting, is not ethical or unethical, it’s just polite behavior. When I run across a tweet that gives me a link good enough to tweet out to my followers, I like to give a nod to the person who brought it to my attention. That is good business. Lifting up those who lift me up is part of being social. Granted, I don’t do it 100% of the time. If I know a particular news item is rolling around on Twitter, I don’t always give the source that brought it to my attention. But I do try and follow a few simple rules of social media etiquette.
Learn how to tweet succinctly so you have room to give a source. The 140 characters (or 120 if you want to leave room to encourage retweeting) on Twitter are challenging. In college, I always dreaded the 250 word essay much more than the three or four page one. The less room you have, the more carefully you need to choose your words. But practice makes perfect.
Learn to use the language ofattribution:
Just giving an @username at the end of the tweet should usually be enough.
“Via @username” indicates the user brought the piece to your attention.
“From @username” indicates the user wrote or was the original source of the information.
“MT” indicates you have taken someone’s tweet and repurposed it for space purposes or removed hashtags and such. Just don’t remove the original tweeter’s username if you can help it.
If the piece came from a newsfeed such as USA Today or Ragan, it’s not as necessary to attribute the service as it is the author. You may have to look up a bio to find a Twitter username for an author, but it’s worth the time. Often, the writer will retweet your message giving you a larger audience exposure. Again, it’s good business.
If you are a blogger and use some information you found online or in print media in a blog piece, be sure and give a nod to the original author. Consider going one step further and link to the original piece so your readers can reference the article as well.
Giving nods online is part of the etiquette of the internet. The more we follow these simple rules of attribution online, the more generous the social media culture will become. Be sure and add your etiquette tips in the comments.
It’s hard to believe that despite the life cycle of social media being only in its infancy, it has revolutionized our personal and professional lives so profoundly. Organizations have finally begun to recognize the importance of building a business platform that can seamlessly amalgamate the interests of employees and customers. Companies are branching out via social media tools such as blogs, forums, viral videos, Facebook contests, etc. that allows customers to see the dynamic personalities driving corporate entities.
Linear processes and conventional marketing models are rusted chains clinging to your organization’s arms, preventing it from reaching its true potential. In order to do so, bold and brilliant leaders who are willing to embrace social media must step up to the mantle and overhaul outdated business models to take your organization to new levels.
Here are 5 essential tips to follow to become a truly successful social media leader:
1. Develop Content People Care About
People like cats – true. People like cats enough to associate business awesomeness with the ability of your cat to do backflips – false.
People want to see authenticity from a business, not how good it is with felines. With the billions of videos, images and articles shared around the social web, as an executive you need to create content that people actually care about.
This is why smart executives realize that the authentic engagement of millions of viewers is directly dependant on the creativity and edginess you put into your content. This kind of creativity could be as simple as producing a weekly webinar of what you learned throughout the week, or an interview with an employee, or a discussion with a client. Engagement with and insight into your organization gives your company a personality that resonates with us regular folk.
2. Exercising Distribution Competence
A piece of content is only as amazing as its reach. No matter how amazing your content is, if no one ever sees it, it’s ultimately worthless. Sad but true. The true success your social media efforts are directly proportional to your ability to leverage your audience and promote your content.
As a leader, you must identify the key social networking influencers and evangelists in your niche and get them to blog and comment on your content. This will create a magnetic aura around your brand that will attract throngs of curious users.
3. Promoting Social Media Awareness
Leaders must be willing to play the role of a tutor to promote social media literacy in an organization. Hosting workshops and reverse mentoring programs for social media awareness will help employees better understand the importance of web 2.0 and lead to better online campaign strategies and internal evangelists of your organization.
Assigning additional positions to support the flow of networked communication such as content curators, network analysts, community administrators, etc. is a great initiative to effectively harness the power of social media.
4. Reconfiguring Your Organizational Infrastructure
As a leader, molding your company’s workflow infrastructure in a way to integrate vertical accountability and transparency with horizontal networking is a key challenge.
Valuing the expertise and feedback of your customers and employees and addressing their concerns will create a sense of collective responsibility for the state of your business.
5. Staying On Top of the Game
A strong leader must be well-versed in all the aspects of social media and consistently track the latest cutting-edge social media tools in the market.
As an executive, you are busy, and likely don’t have time to keep fully up to date with the constant changes in the social sphere. But you have employees. And some of them will have time. Even getting an employee to spend an hour a week or month on social media research could mean the difference between success and failure of your social strategy.
Social media is no longer about teenagers making status posts about what they had for dinner. It has evolved into a quintessential component of every organizations business development strategy. And the most successful organizations are those who see social input straight from the top.
Input for this post was provided by Rand Group – a Houston, Texas based Microsoft business solutions provider for Microsoft Dynamics NAV, GP and SharePoint.
Since 2004, Technorati has published an annual ‘State of the Blogosphere’ report, which analyzes trends and growth in blogging. While they have not yet released a report for 2012, their 2011 reportstated that corporate bloggers make up 8% of the blogosphere. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that corporate blogging now makes up a much larger percentage of total blog activity, but even if it remained at 8%, business-based blogging would still represent a substantial amount of total activity. As more businesses continue to enter the blogosphere, they run the risk of publishing clichéd, outdated articles in the hopes of attracting a wider audience. As I’ve worked to grow my own company blog, I’ve seen plenty of other business blogs that continue to publish material that is either uninteresting or unprofessional and, to stem the flow of poorly written postings, here are five topics I earnestly believe business blogs should avoid.
1. Your own press releases
Press releases are undeniably important for a business, but no one wants to read a press release that has been copied and pasted to a business’s blog. Press releases can only gain traction if news outlets decide to pick them up – that’s why most businesses send their releases to a distributor service. Your readers come to your blog because they’d like to read your advice or analysis on a topic you explore within your industry. Publishing a press release and pretending it is a new post is a disservice to both your business and your audience. And, if you continue to make a practice out of that, some people might even decide not to check your blog anymore if they feel like it is too self-serving.
2. Constantly promoting your business
In the Technorati report mentioned above, 61% of corporate bloggers stated that they blog to earn professional recognition, and 52% reported that they blog to attract new clients. Because there is an ulterior motive to corporate blogging, many companies run the risk of being overly promotional. However, a corporate blog is not another advertising tool. It’s okay to occasionally promote some new aspects of your company, but you are not going to attract readers by constantly patting yourself on the back or expounding on the greatness of your business.
3. Highly detailed, personal stories
A corporate blog is not a diary. Newer businesses occasionally like to blog these heart-wrenching stories about their personal struggles, but to an outside reader not acquainted with the business, it might seem like the writer is just complaining or looking for attention. You want to keep your topics professional – you are, after all, trying to prove to the reader that you are qualified to give them advice. Using your blog as a place to vent about your personal problems, or even your business’s problems, can shake that perception of professionalism.
4. Announcements that jump the gun
This issue is a bit less prevalent, but it is definitely a problem that new small businesses face. In the excitement of new contracts or partnerships, a business might scurry to their blog and announce a deal that is still in the works. Not only will it look bad if talks fall apart, but it might upset your potential partner. If you have exciting news, pump the brakes and make sure everything is worked out and agreed on between both parties before writing up a post about it.
5. Pseudo-New Age advice
If I had a dollar for every time I’ve seen a post on something like ‘Unlocking Your Inner Entrepreneur’ or ‘Finding the Business Zen Within,’ I’d have a pretty good Starbucks coffee fund going. I blame these posts on popular business books, the kind college kids have to read for Business 101 courses. There is certainly something to be said about finding inner motivation and personal satisfaction, but the content of these posts typically border on common sense. Of course you need to ‘stay driven despite obstacles’ – if you give up after hitting your first speed bump, you’d never get anything done!
It can be difficult to come up with fresh topics for your business’s blog, and a lot of businesses fall back on the above topics because they often require little to no additional effort on their part, so they wind up pasting copies of press releases or talking about how buying a bonsai tree helped them to clear their mind and move forward. You want your blog posts to engage your audience, and pounding them over the head with what essentially become advertisements for you or your business isn’t going to do that. Put some time into choosing what topics you cover, and you’ll soon find that more traffic will flow to your blog and, ultimately, your website.
Did the real Justin Bieber just send you a friend request? Now you can know for sure, thanks to a new Facebook feature: Verified Pages.
Much like verified accounts on Twitter, verified Facebook pages will now display a small blue check mark beside their owner’s name on the social network. The check mark will also appear beside the individual’s name in search results, as well as anywhere else on Facebook where it appears.
Just like Twitter’s verified accounts, Facebook’s verified status won’t be offered to everyone. Verified accounts will be specifically available to public figures with large audiences, namely, celebrities, government officials, popular brands and some journalists.
Verified Facebook Pages and profiles will start rolling out Wednesday.
What do you think about the new feature? Are you happy Facebook is verifying the authenticity of some accounts? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
Question: What is your #1 advice for social media strategists and managers?
Answer: Stop talking about social media
Type “social media” into a Google search bar and you’ll find roughly about 4.7 billion results in .30 seconds. Next, try “social media conference.” You’ll see something along the lines of 1.2 billion results in .25 seconds. Social media is important but I’d argue we aren’t celebrating it for the reasons we should. Instead, we are forcing social media to conform to traditional thinking and processes rather than adapting business philosophies and supporting methodologies to meet new opportunities.
Every day, I hear about how social media strategists and managers are frustrated with the lack of executive support. Yet, many aren’t doing themselves any favors. Executives don’t speak the language of social media. They speak the language of the C-Suite and their audience are shareholders and stakeholders…not necessarily customers or employees or “people” in its most human sense.
So, in the face of skepticism or fear, the best advice that I can offer you is to learn the language of the C-Suite when making the case for what it is you believe is the right thing to do. Making the case for social media has less to do Facebook or Twitter or Likes, views or Retweets and more to do with using these networks to glean or introduce value. To earn the attention and respect of the C-Suite and ultimately customers is the ability to connect the dots to the very things that every stakeholder values and communicating it in a way that is approachable and appreciated.
This takes a thoughtful approach to rendering value in a contextual means that hits home with different people their way.
Altimeter colleague Charlene Li and I conducted a series of research interviews and surveys over the last year on this very topic…how social today’s social media strategies align (or do not align) with business goals. We shared our findings in a newly released report, “The Evolution of Social Business Six Stages of Social Media Transformation.” Needless to say, we found a significant gap And, it is this gap that makes communicating value to executives difficult if not impossible.
Charlene and I found that only 34% of businesses felt that their social strategy was connected to business outcomes and just 28% felt that they had a holistic approach to social media, where lines of business and business functions work together under a common vision. A mere 12% were confident they had a plan that looked beyond the next year. And, perhaps most astonishing was that only one half of companies surveyed said that top executives were “informed, engaged and aligned with their companies’ social strategy.”
In the early days of social media, emergent networks changed how people connect to one another and the information that’s important to them. With each update, shared experience, and event, the world shrank. People were and are becoming increasingly connected and as a result they are more informed. With information and connectedness comes the reality of increased customer expectations. Value, engagement, entertainment, personalization, people must takeaway something meaningful from the exchange otherwise there can be no relationship. A relationship is after all a mutual exchange where all parties believe that connectedness is beneficial.
Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and every network thereafter are merely communities, ecosystems, and platforms where information is exchanged and relationships are formed and abandoned. How you make the case for engagement and how to deliver or extract value isn’t directly tied to the nature of the environment as much as it is the facilitator of the way and the weight that value is defined, expressed, and measured.
If we’re not providing solutions we may in fact be contributing to the problem. See, social technology isn’t the answer; it’s part of the answer. Yet social strategists are often caught up in a socialized ecosystem of catch-up and that’s part of the challenge and the test. There’s always going to be a new network or another shiny object. There are always new case studies or expert theories flooding blogs, conferences, and books.
Again, the best advice I can give you is to stop talking about social media as a means to an end and start thinking about how social media becomes a means toward triggering meaningful activities or outcomes that align with business priorities or objectives and customer expectations.
This is the time to get back to basics. This is the time to take a step back.
Social media is not the crux of you argument. It is an enabler. This is your opportunity to lift the conversation from tools to value and to translate the promise and opportunity of social into an emissary of meaningful engagement that aligns business goal, social media strategies and customer value.
Twitter and Facebook are valuable tools for social enterprises – but there are a number of pitfalls you should avoid
To what extent can the likes of Facebook and Twitter help your social enterprise? Photograph: Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images
Young, new social entrepreneurs around the world face a similar problem: building an audience and sustaining virtual communities. With social media playing an important role in audience building, early-stage entrepreneurs have begun to focus on popular networking sites to leverage engagement and maximise reach. Yet this is the reason that most early enterprises often fail in garnering public interest.
Peter W Roberts, the academic director of social enterprise at the Goizueta Business School of Emory University, pointed out in the Harvard Business Review that there was a definite link between successful enterprises and an established social media presence. He also suggested that the success of most of these enterprises often depended on factors relating to age [of the entrepreneur], sector and approach. However, my own learning has been different.
Organisation v cause: Most emerging enterprises focus on promoting their organisation instead of the cause. While the former is necessary, it fails to make a personal connect. Prakhar Bhartiya, the founder of Youth Alliance, told me that credibility was one of the biggest challenges when he started his organisation over a year ago. “We get around 60% of our applications on Facebook because our viral reach is high. But, initially, we had to rely on newspaper coverage or visibility through established organisations to validate the work we do,” he said, “We focused on the cause we were supporting, and today, since we can boast of impact, we use it to promote our organisation. This worked for us.” The trick to good organisational visibility is to allow people to understand your vision and not just your venture. Cause-driven organisations enjoy a high-recall value and have often sailed the social media wave effortlessly.
The digital disconnect: Since audience building and participation largely happens online, another challenge that young entrepreneurs face is the sheer lack of physical interaction with their audience. Young social entrepreneurs such as Kuldeep Dantewadia, founder of Reap Benefit, an organisation that focuses on low-cost waste management solutions, are still sceptical about the right use of social media communities. “For us, word of mouth has achieved the best impact. Social media is merely a validating factor. It works as a platform to spark interest rather than induce action,” he suggested. “Facebook lets us know that people are interested. But this interest doesn’t translate into an impulse to act.”
On Twitter, too, targeted audience building seems a distant dream for those who work on the ground. “Twitter is great for conversations. But I work mostly with rural schools, and my audience, primarily school children, are absent from Twitter,” Kuldeep said. “We simply didn’t know how to position Reap Benefit on Twitter, so now we use it to chronicle our work instead.”
Personality v problem: A good way to tell when an organisation is moving away from its goal is when it begins to leverage social media engagement by maintaining a central focus entirely on the person who is the driving force behind the organisation. This diverts an audience attention from the problem and allows the audience to favour the personality behind the cause. For instance, when one talks of Selco online, it is easy to associate the organisation with Harish Hande, its founder, instead of its great work in the field of solar energy.
Competition v collaboration: In recent years, overcrowding has led to a pressure to compete in the Indian social sector. Organisations that focus on similar social causes usually work parallel to each other when leveraging their online communities to highlight their own unique approaches to problems. But the audience eventually drifts, looking for newer interests. Healthy collaborations and strategic partnerships with other players in the sector online will encourage dialogue and create a synergy among online communities. Medhavi Gandhi, who founded the Happy Hands Foundation to help create sustainable livelihoods, is a great example. Through her work, she focused on cross-sector dialogues with the corporate world and involved them through gift giving. These partnerships helped validate her organisation’s online presence as well.
Success v excess: Early-stage enterprises also make the mistake of prioritising reach while building online communities. Scheduling tools for Twitter and Facebook adverts are seen as fantastic, easy options to reach big numbers. But this doesn’t help in driving engagement. And engagement is crucial to sustaining online communities. Inclusivity ensures that an audience stays interested and adds value to your organisation’s outreach. Leveraging two-way communication through active forums such as Google groups or Facebook groups makes sure that conversation with the audience isn’t stifled. If there is an excess of information being generated one way, it’s possible to misinterpret those numbers that organisations think they are reaching.
So what is the secret to establishing a solid presence online? In all honesty, it is hard to tell. Every organisation’s needs differ, as do its priorities. The key, however, is to identify the exact space where entrepreneurs can communicate their core message. Social media platforms can often tempt with numbers, but there’s often more to numbers than meets the eye.
If someone asked you how many social networks you actively use, how many would you list? To start, you need Facebook to share your personal updates, Twitter to share the latest news, Google+ for Hangouts, Pinterest for recipes, Instagram for your photos, Foursquare to share your location-based tips, LinkedIn for professional updates, Tumblr for cat GIFs and, before you know it, you’re reflecting on how you find time to use all of them.
In a post on Quora, a user wrote, “I have noticed in myself … that becoming continuously and actively involved in a new social network often leads soon to the cessation of involvement in another one.” A user in the thread replied, “It’s difficult for any single person to maintain relationships in more than three communities at a time, [but] I’d say that a very social, highly engaged person can manage up to nine with success.”
The ultimate consensus from this conversation? Apparently each person is different when it comes to keeping an active presence on multiple networks. While some can balance their usage, others ditch a network in favor of another that better suits their interests.
One recent study on social media usage revealed that the average user has two social media accounts. While some users find pleasure in multiple networks, there are people who have found a single community they love and stick with it, even when the temptations of a new social network arise. And there are others who have used various networks and narrowed their usage down until only one platform remained.
Avoiding Familiar Faces
For Matthew Shirey, a business owner in Georgia, he originally joined Twitter in 2008, and was a self-described “heavy user.” Shirey also took Facebook for a spin, but left soon after because he grew tired of seeing all the familiar faces. “I got rid of Facebook because it was mostly old high school people who wanted to hang out on the Internet,” he said.
“They didn’t want to hang out with me then — why would I want to hang out now?”
“They didn’t want to hang out with me then — why would I want to hang out now?”
It may seem to be against the point for people to avoid a social network because of friends they have in real life. In fact, according to a 2011 study from Pew Internet, roughly two-thirds of social media users said staying in touch with friends and family is a major reason why they’re on these platforms. But many users have found solace in networks where they are bound, not by the fact that they know people, but by their interests.
John Ellis, a retired neurologist from Amarillo, Texas, said his family and friends had suggested he join Facebook, but nothing they said about the service appealed to him. “I’m a bit of a recluse,” Ellis said. “[I've] maintained contact with anyone I cared about via email, and saw no use in my life for MySpace or Facebook.”
Instead, Ellis found Google+, a social network he said has often been a lost cause when it comes to inviting his family and friends to join, but he noted that it’s not a bad thing. “I’d say that is a plus about Google+,” he said. “Instead of blood relations and an echo chamber of friends, you get new people with fresh ideas and perspectives, without all the relationship baggage if you want to argue or disconnect from them.”
Others, like Charlie Meisch, a policy communications consultant in Washington, D.C., feel less inclined to join a network like Facebook because they have significant others who keep them informed about updates from friends and family.
“My wife is on Facebook so she gives me updates about people I wouldn’t have otherwise seen,”
“My wife is on Facebook so she gives me updates about people I wouldn’t have otherwise seen,” Meisch said. “With Facebook, there’s still a part of me who would not find it useful. Maybe I’m being stubborn.”
Meisch has been solely a Twitter user since he joined the service in 2008. “Twitter appealed to me because it wasn’t Facebook. It feels more like a marketplace of ideas and information, and I think there’s definitely an allure to connecting with a community based on interests.”
Being Where Your Friends Are
While using a social network to connect with people over similar interests appeals to some, many are satisfied with a social network that connects them with their friends and family. For Zachary Kirker, a college student in Cincinnati, Facebook has been his first and only social network for that very reason. “It’s where my friends are. I get on Facebook when I’m bored or I need to get ahold of somebody. It seems like everyone has it.”
This is the power that comes with having an active user base of more than one billion people. In a 2012 study by Pew Internet, roughly 67 percent of online adults said they use Facebook. But, Kirker said, he feels less of a loyalty to the actual social network and more to where his friends reside.
“If you think back when Myspace turned to Facebook, my generation switched over — there was no one on Myspace and everyone was on Facebook,” he noted.
“If my friends dropped Facebook and went to Twitter, I would probably switch over.”
“If my friends dropped Facebook and went to Twitter, I would probably switch over.”
With many social media networks, you have to work to build your following, said Bethany George, an executive-in-residence at an innovation center in Ohio, but with Facebook, “all my friends are there. They might not be on LinkedIn or Twitter, but they will be on Facebook.”
George joined Facebook in 2005 as a graduate student and has since become a “heavy user” of the platform, not only personally but professionally. “It’s great that I can use Facebook for multiple purposes. The user base is there professionally, so I don’t have to worry about building that. On the supply and demand side, the market is there.”
Ironically, though, George said that she is not on LinkedIn, and blames time for being the biggest deterrent. “I do realize the value of using LinkedIn as the network for professionals and being able to call upon people you may or may not know. So that’s been on my to-do list.”
Finding Time for Social Media
Finding time to be active on multiple social media networks appears to be an issue for many people, and there are countless articles offering tips and advice for dealing with social media burnout that may ultimately come from trying to keep up with all the content.
Shirey, the business owner from Georgia who originally used Twitter as his primary source of social networking, started feeling the stress and anxiety of managing multiple social presences when he joined App.net in August 2012. As Shirey began spending more time on App.net, he started feeling pressure to keep up with all the noise on every network.
“That’s one of the main reasons I ended up deleting [my Twitter and Facebook accounts]. I felt the need to check and see if there were things there. I thoroughly enjoy every minute I spend on ADN, but then I’d get an alert on Facebook or Twitter and then I’d grumble and head over.”
Shirey said he “threw a little party when I deleted my Facebook account,” but quitting Twitter made him feel queasy. “I had put so much time into it that platform,” he said, acknowledging that he had more than 31,000 tweets by the time he deleted his account.
“But I don’t regret quitting it at all. Now I don’t feel the need to go check it anymore because it’s not there.”
“But I don’t regret quitting it at all. Now I don’t feel the need to go check it anymore because it’s not there.”
For users who have only ever been on one social network, they don’t understand how difficult it can be to quit a service, Shirey added. But for those who are considering using just one social network, he said people need to reflect on what platform makes them the happiest.
“What it boils down to for me is that I made the decision that social networking is supposed to be fun. Now I can go hang out with my friends and enjoy my social life. It’s not work anymore.”
Tech manufacturers that boast how fast their devices can juice up might want to listen up: A California teen has developed a super-capacitor that could lead to a 20- to 30-second phone charge.
Super-capacitors are energy-storage devices that have a long cycle life, and have the potential to store a lot of energy per unit volume. Sounds dandy, right? Not quite. The devices have limited use because they store less energy than batteries. But Eesha Khare, 18, of Saratoga, Calif. has made quite an advancement with this technology.
“The super-capacitor I have developed uses a special nanostructure, which allows for a lot greater energy per unit volume,” Khare said in a video interview at last week’s 2013 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Phoenix. The world’s largest science fair brought together 1,600 high-school finalists from all over the world, who competed for more than $4 million in awards.
“It can charge very quickly, and it can last for 10,000 cycles, compared to batteries which are only like 1,000 cycles,” added Khare, a student at Lynbrook High School in San Jose, Calif.
Imagine this: If this sort of technology replaces conventional batteries, our gadgets could someday spend much less time plugged in, as demonstrated by Khare’s test with an LED light.
“After charging my super-capacitor for 20 seconds, I was able to light an LED device,” she said. “Just seeing that LED light was my signal that I know what I’m doing, and this is truly applicable to the real world.”
A phone could be fully charged in 20 to 30 seconds since Khare’s tiny device fits inside cell-phone batteries. This sort of advancement in energy storage could also be applied to laptops and electric vehicles, among other devices.
As part of Intel’s competition, Khare won a $50,000 Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award (pictured above, far left). After receiving the award, Khare said she wants to “just keep making a lot of scientific advancements.”
It’s easier than ever to share what you’re listening to on Pandorawith your Facebook friends, thanks to an extended partnership between the two companies.
Starting Wednesday, the songs and stations you listen to, as well as the tracks you give a “thumbs up,” can be shared directly to Facebook. Details about your activity on Pandora, when shared via the social network, is then aggregated and displayed as part of the music section on your Facebook profile.
Pandora already supported sharing individual pieces of content to Facebook and Twitter. The new integration is the product of a year-and-a-half-long conversation between Facebook and Pandora.
“We’ve been talking to Facebook about how best to embrace this idea of what they call Timeline Apps — ‘How do you make it really, really easy for people to update their Facebook identity as they consume content around the Internet and on mobile?’” Tom Conrad, Pandora’s chief technology officer, told Mashable.
“Our frame in the conversation with them has always been, ‘How do we embrace this technical opportunity in a way that drives real value for both Pandora listeners and for Facebook users?”
Facebook’s recent Timeline update, as well as its music section, compelled Pandora to pursue deeper integration, Conrad added.
Users are now able to seamlessly stream all their activity on Pandora to Facebook through an opt-in program. They can choose to send all data about their Pandora activity, or just a bit of their musical history (e.g. songs you give a “thumbs up”), to the social network.
Shared activity will appear in the Activity Log and the Music section of users’ Facebook profiles, as well as on their friends’ News Feeds based on Facebook’s algorithm.
“Seeing an ever-updating ticker of what my friends are listening to — what all of my friends are listening to — is less interesting than coming to understand the musical identity of a subset of the people that I interact with on Facebook,” Conrad explained.
Facebook’s News Feed algorithm focuses on friends that users regularly interact with. That functionality extends to Pandora’s Facebook integration as well, so they won’t suddenly have a News Feed filled with Pandora posts from all their high-school friends. In essence, it’s a Facebook-curated feed that is limited only to people that a user is interested in hearing about.
When sharing isn’t desired, a prominent toggle button within Pandora allows incognitio listening. This may be enforced, for example, when a user is listening to a holiday-themed radio station, but doesn’t want to broadcast those details to their friends.
Intended to enhance the Pandora experience rather than invade privacy, Conrad said the service will be reaching out and educating its users about the new feature, explaining how to opt in, and how to control what data (if any) gets sent to Facebook.
For the past six weeks we’ve been using our Facebook cover photo to demonstrate fun ways to leverage the new cover photo rules. If you haven’t heard, a few months back Facebook relaxed their cover photo rules and now the only rule that business Pages need to pay attention to is that there can’t be more than 20 percent text in the cover photo. We found this awesome tool you can use to find out if your cover photo is in compliance with the 20% text rule, check it out here.
The great news is that businesses can have calls to action in their cover photos, driving traffic to their apps, website, in-store locations and encouraging engagement.
Here are six ways, including examples, that you can leverage your cover photo and use the new rules to your advantage.
#1: Drive your audience to your top apps
Facebook allows a business Page to have up to 12 custom apps installed. Three of the installed apps can be “favorites” and appear to the right of the profile picture below the cover photo. Businesses and brands on Facebook use Facebook apps to run contests, sweepstakes and fan-gates as well as build e-mail lists, tout landing pages and integrate with other social networks. In our example, our top apps link to our first eBook, Everything Your Social Media Guru Didn’t Tell You About Facebook Marketing, some ShortStack app examples and to our Facebook 101 ShortStack University Lessons. We used the cover photo to call out each app and direct our fans to the proper apps with different colored lines.
#2: Ask your fans to “Like” you
“Ask and you shall receive!” This is true when it comes to Facebook! Try using the cover photo to ask your fans to “Like” your business Page. Get creative by having someone point to the “Like” button or mention what cool perks your fans receive by “Liking” your Page. In our cover photo we featured one of our favorite developers, Dylan, smiling and pointing to the “Like” button. Who could deny Dylan?
#3: Direct fans to an offer
In tip #1 we talked about “favorite” apps. Often times businesses will use the top three apps to feature their latest promotions or offers. If one of your apps is a link to something awesome for your fans, use your cover photo to display the offer and direct your fans to the app where they can claim it. In our example we had released a new eBook, Big Brand Facebook Secrets for Small Businesses, and fans of ShortStack could download the eBook by going to our custom app. In our cover photo we feature our eBook with a call to action and an arrow pointing to the top app where fans can get their free copy.
If your offer is hosted outside of Facebook, that will work too. Simply provide a link to where your fans can claim their offer, just be sure to make the link easy to re-type since you cannot have active links in a cover photo.
#4: Provide a link to valuable information
Chances are you don’t put every bit of valuable information you offer to your fans on your Facebook Page. Sometimes you want your fans to go to your website or other social networks to receive valuable information. The Facebook cover is the perfect place to lead people outside of Facebook for more information. Just keep in mind, as we mentioned earlier, that you can’t have active links in the cover photo so you’ll want to be sure to create a landing Page or have a simple URL or Bit.ly link that users can re-type easily. For our next cover photo we directed people to our Twitter Page where we provide Facebook and social media tips, links to free resources and articles by other industry experts.
#5: Ask your fans to share your Page
This is similar to tip #2 where you asked your fans to “Like” you, only now you’re asking them to share your awesomeness with their friends. Oftentimes people log onto Facebook and they scroll through their News Feed and visit their friends and favorite brands’ Pages but they aren’t thinking about telling someone about their favorite brands. Your cover photo can be the perfect reminder for fans to pass on how cool you are. Be sure to make your cover photo fun and give your fans a reason to want to tell their friends to “Like” you. For our cover photo we featured a still shot from our Harlem Shake video with the call to action “ShortStack Rocks! (pass it on).”
#6: Send people to your website
If you’re like us you use your Facebook Page to offer resources, talk about fun stuff, show off your employees, etc. You rarely get into the nitty gritty of business and pitch your product because that’s not really what Facebook is for, that’s what a website is for. If you’re wanting to pitch something about your product, try using your cover photo to lead your fans back to your website where they can learn about your product. At ShortStack we offer two months free when you sign up for any of our annual plans. We used our cover photo to tell people this and lead them to our pricing page on our website where they could learn more.
There you have it! Get out there and implement the new cover photo rules for business Pages. If you need some help visualizing the 20 percent text guidelines rule, check out this resource we posted a few months back.
A Facebook group is helping the victims of the massive Oklahoma tornado, which killed 51 people and left many homeless, get their belongings back.
On its trail of destruction, the tornado has blown debris from houses — including people’s personal belongings and important documents — many miles away.
The Facebook group asks members to post photos of any items or documents that were blown into their yard, so that they can be returned to the rightful owners.
“I’m just trying to help. I couldn’t imagine losing my kids’ pictures,” Leslie Hagelberg, the group’s founder, told The Huffington Post.
The group is going strong. At the time of this writing, it has 7,260 members, and dozens of items have been recognized by their owners. If you think you can help in any way, join the group, here.
Use these platforms to manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives.
To succeed in today’s connected world, you need to build a community around your company, brand, and products. Over the last decade, social media monitoring has become a primary form of business intelligence, used to identify, predict, and respond to consumer behavior. Listening to what your customers, competitors, critics, and supporters are saying about you is key to getting great results from your social media campaigns. There are countless tools out there, offering many ways to analyze, measure, display, and create reports about your engagement efforts.
These 50 tools distill data in ways that are relevant to your social media marketing plan, enabling you to figure out how to succeed with your audience.
Determining which tools are right for you requires a clear definition of your objectives. Some are real-time, highly customized dashboards that enable you to manage multiple accounts, use shared work spaces, and respond on multiple social networks with one click. Others are simple, effective, and lightweight, and provide the right amount of functionality.
Alterian/SDL ($) | Alterian is now SDL, an integrated platform that blends the marketing analytics, campaign management, and social media capabilities from Alterian with those of SDL.
Argyle Social ($) | Identify and engage with more prospects, qualify and quantify better leads, and build and maintain stronger relationships by linking social media actions to the marketing platforms you’re already using.
BackTweets (Free) | Track how many people are talking about you, who’s talking, and what they’re saying. You can search through a tweet archive for URLs sent via Twitter, including results for full URL links, shortened URLs, and URLs without the “www” prefix.
BlitzMetrics ($) | Social media dashboards for your brand that monitor content across Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, and more. It helps you benchmark against your competitors, learn which demographics are the most active, and track content performance so you can improve your reach and engagement.
Bottlenose ($) | A tool that provides live social intelligence by analyzing activity across all the major social networks. Use it to search, monitor, analyze, target, and engage in real time, all from one place.
Brandwatch ($) |This service reads through and summarizes what’s being said on the Web about brands, people, and products. Define keywords to track (brands, topics, people names, products) and get access to mentions, trend and campaign analysis, and competitive info.
Buffer (Free and $) | An app that manages multiple Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts, with the ability to set a tweeting or updating schedule unique to each. Includes detailed analytics for all your posts.
Buzz Equity ($) | Listen to social media conversations in real time from various social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, blogs, news, forums, reviews, and video websites.
CARMA ($) | Evaluate your overall social media image, brand recognition, message penetration, competitive positioning, and areas of strength and weakness, and use the data to develop a strategically sound and effective communication strategy.
Collective Intellect ($) | This Oracle platform captures millions of conversations a day across multiple social networks, including Facebook and Twitter. It extracts sentiments, preferences, and intentions from those sources and displays the information in real time.
Crimson Hexagon ($) | Tap into social media conversations with listening tools that help you understand how the most engaged consumers think and feel about your brand, why consumers are choosing other brands over yours, and how your ads/marketing are really perceived by your audience.
Curalate ($) | This tool applies advanced image analytics to social media conversations to give you detailed insights for your initiatives on Instagram and Pinterest.
CustomScoop ($) | Track media coverage, listen to social conversations, monitor your competition, measure PR and marketing effectiveness, and get automated daily reports.
CyberAlert ($) | Monitor 100,000+ consumer-generated media sites for word of mouth, including Twitter, blogs, Usenet (there’s a blast from the past , and video sites.
Facebook Insights (Free) | Facebook’s built-in tool provides Facebook Page owners with metrics around their content. Helps you understand and analyze trends within user growth and demographics.
Fliptop ($) | A customer intelligence platform that uses publicly available information, including social data, to score leads so you can prioritize your pipeline, better target your audience, and know more about your customers.
Google Alerts (Free) | Get email updates of the latest relevant Google results (Web, news, etc.) based on your queries.
Gorkana ($) | This tool searches through and filters conversations to provides insights into the most relevant conversations about your brand. Offers audits and reports plus daily social media alerts.
HootSuite (Free and $) | A social media management system that enables teams to collaboratively execute campaigns across multiple social networks from one dashboard. Includes audience identification tools, the ability to streamline workflow, and custom reports. I use HootSuite to manage my company’s Twitter account.
Icerocket (Free) | A free resource for brand monitoring, it taps the Web, blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, and delivers easy-to-read results in one page.
Klout (Free) | A tool that finds the influencers in your audience so you can target and empower them to become advocates for your brand.
MarketMeSuite ($) | A dashboard similar to Hootsuite and TweetDeck, it can be used to manage and market on multiple social profiles, schedule messages, use geotargeting, and more.
MediaMiser ($) | Web app that collects and analyzes relevant content about your brand from social, traditional, and digital media. Spots trends in media coverage, including sentiment, share of voice, and top regions.
MediaVantage ($) | Pulls traditional media coverage and social media mentions into a database that helps you monitor your reputation, align your teams and messaging, and measure results.
Meltwater ($) | Combines social media monitoring and analytics with social engagement tools to help you create targeted marketing campaigns and build brand relationships.
Mention (Free to $) | An iPhone and Android app that lets you create alerts for your company, its keywords, your brand, and your competitors. Updates in real time.
NetBase ($)| A social intelligence platform that enables you to monitor, understand, react, engage, and publish through both owned and earned channels.
Netvibes (Free and $) | A platform that tracks clients, customers, competitors, and your reputation across media sources, analyzes live results with 3rd party reporting tools, and provides media monitoring dashboards for brand clients.
NUVI ($) | Real-time display of conversations that weight influence and sentiment. You can instantly see the social media conversations taking place in your market and immediately engage your detractors and evangelists.
Pinpuff (Free) | Similar to Klout but focusing only on the Pinterest, it measures the how people share images about your brand and the influence that results.
PinReach ($) | Measures your Pinterest influence by giving you an overall score and easy-to-read charts and tables that show your most popular pins and boards.
Plugg.io (Free) | Manage and tweet from multiple accounts, get friend suggestions, and automate syndication via blogs and news sources.
Shoutlet ($) | A community management and moderation platform for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, and YouTube. Includes integrated workflow tools and task assignments.
Social Marketing Cloud ($) | An automated solution that enables you to monitor and analyze blogs, forums, wikis, and microblogging sites to track real-time conversations about your brand.
Social Mention (Free) | A real-time social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user-generated content from Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google, etc. into a single stream.
Social Response ($) | Formerly Cotweet. Build dynamic Facebook fan pages, respond in real time on Twitter and Facebook, and communicate 1-to-1 with your followers.
Sprout Social ($) | Web app that monitors Twitter, Facebook Pages, LinkedIn, FourSquare, Gowalla, and other networks where consumers are engaging with businesses and brands. Also offers contact management, competitive insight, lead generation, and analytics.
SWIX Analytics ($) | This tool tracks 75 social media metrics in one dashboard, enabling you to measure your social media influence.
Synthesio ($) | Platform that offers global, multilingual monitoring of your brand’s reputation, campaign management, influencer tracking, and competitive intelligence. Well-suited for large enterprises.
Sysomos ($) | A real-time monitoring dashboard that collects relevant online conversations about your brand and provides insights with detailed metrics and graphics.
Talkwalker ($) | This reporting tool constantly scans the Web and social media to monitor your brand, reputation, and competitors. It can also be used for campaign tracking, market research, and customer service.
Topsy ($) | Monitors tweets, websites, blogs, and social networks, and analyzes/indexes/ranks content and trends.
Trackur ($) | Quickly monitor your online reputation, measure social media trends, and analyze social media mentions for your company, brands, or clients.
TweetBeep (Free and $) | This app is like Google Alerts for Twitter: Choose some keywords and receive daily search results via email.
TweetDeck (Free) | Very similar to HootSuite, only without all the bells and whistles, this client enables you to tweet and track mentions, people, and keywords.
Twitalyzer ($) | One-click access to Twitter metrics that analyze followers, mentions, retweets, and influencers and their locations. It can also be used to compare your Twitter account to those of your competitors.
UberVU ($) | Keeps track of all the major social media platforms in real time and delivers opportunities for audience engagement.
Visible ($) | A social media analytics and engagement dashboard that enables you to monitor, analyze, and engage in social media conversations all in one place. It can also be integrated into your existing CRM system.
Vocus ($) | Cloud marketing and analytics platform that looks at social, search, email, and PR, and delivers real-time marketing opportunities in the form of leads, prospects, social media conversations, curated content and inbound media inquiries.
Do you want your small business to enjoy a higher profile, greater success, more engaged employees and increased profitability in 2013? For a better business in the New Year, begin by making resolutions to improve in the 10 areas below.
Have a plan. Too often, small business owners get so caught up in day-to-day operations that they neglect long-range planning. If you have a business plan, update it to reflect your current goals. If you’ve never written a business plan, do so—it will force you to think about what you want to achieve in 2013 and beyond.
Take action. Don’t put that business plan in a drawer and forget about it. No matter how busy you are, set aside at least one hour a week to assess your progress toward the goals you’ve set. Together with your partners and key employees, create action steps and set deadlines for accomplishing them.
Give your website a makeover. Does your business’s website reflect what you do, or is the information outdated? Does it look current, or is it sporting a design template from 1999? Does it load easily on mobile devices so customers can access your business wherever they are? Make the necessary changes to modernize your website.
Take charge of your finances. If you’re not already using accounting software, make 2013 the year you upgrade. A program such as QuickBooks is inexpensive, easy to learn and makes budgeting and forecasting simple.
Plan ahead for financing. How will you finance your business growth plans for 2013? If you can’t fund growth from profits, investigate options for outside financing, whether from bank loans, private investors such as angel capital groups, or your friends and family.
Start socializing. No matter what your industry, almost any business can benefit from social media. If you aren’t currently using social media, resolve to try at least one social network in 2013. If you are active on social media, step it up a notch by learning more about your favorite social network, posting more often or adding more videos and photos to your mix.
Delegate. It’s tough for small business owners to give up control, but delegation is essential for business growth. Give employees more autonomy so you don’t become a bottleneck in your organization. Try to structure operations so you can focus on your strengths and delegate the rest.
Assess your HR needs. Do your employees have the skills your business needs to grow in 2013? Whether you need to provide additional training, hire new employees or outsource to independent contractors, think about how you will fill the gaps.
Upgrade your equipment. Whether it’s technology tools like tablets and smartphones or a new pizza oven for your restaurant, small changes can make a big difference to your bottom line. Decide what investment would have the biggest impact on your productivity and profits, and figure out a way to make it happen.
Celebrate success. No matter how busy you are, be sure to celebrate when you, your employees and your business achieve important goals. Taking time out to recognize results will re-energize you and your team for the next challenge.
The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) has released benchmark research projects in North America, Australia, and the United Kingdom. One overwhelming consistency across all the marketers we’ve surveyed relates to content marketing effectiveness. Across the board, only 33 percent of marketers deem their efforts as effective. Now, if that was a batting average, we’d be all-stars, but…
There are a number of reasons for this, including the fact that this whole content marketing thing, even though hundreds of years old, is still relatively new to us marketers. After all, who told us that we’d actually have to be content publishers at some point in our career?
While each of us has our own challenges that we need to bear and break through, here are a few particularly troubling ones that have been on my mind:
1. Your content is all about you: Remember, customers don’t care about you; they care about themselves and their problems. We often forget that point when we describe how wonderful our widget is (which no one cares about).
2. Your fear of failing paralyzes you: Taking chances with your content and experimenting a bit reveals the possibilities for your content marketing, and uncovers new and valuable customer stories.
3. You’re setting the bar too low: Your content marketing should be the best in your industry — better than all your competition, and better than the media and the other publishers in your space. How can you be the most trusted expert in your industry if your content marketing doesn’t reflect these high standards?
4. You’re not sourcing correctly: The majority of brands outsource some portion of the content marketing process. Don’t be afraid to find internal content champions — as well as outside journalists, writers, and content agencies — to help you tell your story.
5. You operate in silos: Are you telling different stories across your efforts in PR, corporate communications, social media, email marketing, etc.? Do all your departments follow a consistent corporate story line? Epic content marketing means that your company is telling a consistent story.
6. You don’t seek out discomfort: In his book, “Linchpin,” Seth Godin states that if we don’t consistently step out of our comfort area, then we are doomed to the status quo. Do something completely unexpected with your content from time to time.
7. You do not have calls to action: Every piece of content should have a call to action. If it doesn’t, at least recognize this, and consider the real purpose behind why you developed the content.
8. You are too focused on one particular channel: Stop thinking “email newsletter” or “Facebook.” Think about the problem you are solving for your customer. Then tell that story in different ways — and tell it everywhere your customers go to seek authoritative information.
9. Your content isn’t owned: Someone in your organization (possibly you) must take ownership of the content marketing plan.
10. Your C-level doesn’t buy in: Organizations without C-level buy-in are three times more likely to fail at content marketing.
11. You are not niche enough: You need to be the leading expert in the world in your niche. Pick a content area that is both meaningful to your business and attainable and create content around that subject.
12. Your team’s too slow: As much as I hate to say it, speed beats perfection in most cases. Figure out a streamlined process for your storytelling.
13. You execute inconsistently: Your content marketing is a promise to your customers. Think about the morning paper (if you receive it): When it doesn’t come on time, how upset are you? You need to have the same mindset with your content marketing. Distribute content consistently and ON TIME.
I’m sure you’ve just thought of a few more reasons that are holding you back. Whatever the reason, nothing is insurmountable. What’s great about where we are as an industry is that there are so many amazing case studies and industry leaders helping us get to the next level. Identify your key challenges, tackle them, and move on to tell your story. You can do it!
“Facebook was not originally created to be a company,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in his SEC Registration letter a little more than three months before Facebook went public on May 18, 2012. “It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.”
In the year since the Facebook IPO, some things haven’t changed: Zuckerberg still sports his trademark hoodies, employees still rate their company and their founder highly, and Facebook still talks about its grand mission to make the world more open and connected. But the era of Facebook operating or being perceived as anything other than a corporation seems more distant with each passing day.
Facebook is a company now, a huge corporation in fact, with a market cap of more than $60 billion, a staff of nearly 5,000 employees and an active user base of more than 1.1 billion. Perhaps most importantly, it must now answer to shareholders rather than just users. That simple fact has had a noticeable impact on Facebook, both in terms of how employees operate and the new features that have been released.
More Focus on Making Money
For much of its history, Facebook didn’t seem particularly concerned with monetization, but that changed when the company filed to go public. In the same SEC letter, Zuckerberg attempted to position himself as being more interested in making money than some might have assumed before.
“Most great people care primarily about building and being a part of great things, but they also want to make money,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Through the process of building a team — and also building a developer community, advertising market and investor base — I’ve developed a deep appreciation for how building a strong company with a strong economic engine and strong growth can be the best way to align many people to solve important problems.”
As it turned out, that wasn’t just idle talk. During Facebook’s third quarter earnings call in October, Zuckerberg revealed that each of the company’s product teams had been charged with coming up with strategies to generate revenue for their respective products. This operational change coincided with Facebook experimenting with a range of new money-making efforts across various product areas.
Facebook started charging users $1 to send messages to the inboxes of people they don’t know, and tried out higher price points for sending messages to certain celebrities on the social network, including charging $100 to message Zuckerberg. Facebook also introduced the option for users to pay $7 to “promote” their posts in their friends’ News Feeds to improve the chances these updates getting seen — something that used to be a given (and completely free) in the earlier days of the social network.
Then, of course, there are the ads.
Placing Ads Front and Center
Since going public last May, Facebook has introduced mobile app install ads, retargeting ads based on the user’s browsing habits, sponsored results in search, a mobile-only ad product and more. There are ads in the right rail, ads in the News Feed and ads in the mobile app, and if recent rumors prove true, soon there will be video ads in the feed as well.
It has now gotten to the point where it’s hard to tell whether Facebook’s biggest product innovations are designed more for users or for advertisers — chances are, it’s probably both.
Facebook started rolling out a completely redesigned News Feed in March, which was presented as giving users more room for images and more ability to organize their feeds. But the company also acknowledged that the redesign would provide more real estate for marketers to serve bigger and richer ads in the News Feed, and industry experts have suggested the redesign will pave the way for the inevitable introduction of video ads.
More recently, the company introduced Facebook Home, a home screen and app launcher for Android that puts activity from the social network front and center on any phone which has Home installed. Zuckerberg said the thinking behind Home was about “putting people first instead of apps,” but it also has the potential to serve ads to users on their home screens — something that Zuckerberg said may come to Home down the road.
Becoming a Mobile-First Company
While users may groan at some of these changes, at least one seems to be a net positive for the community: Facebook has become far more focused on mobile.
Facebook was born in the desktop age and had been criticized in the past for its sluggish smartphone apps and decision to focus on HTML5. As Facebook prepared to go public, analysts and investors started to express concerns about the social network’s weaknesses on mobile and questioned whether this would hurt its long-term prospects. That pressure appears to have pushed Facebook to take its mobile efforts more seriously.
Facebook re-built its iPhone app from scratch to be faster, and has issued frequent updates to each of its apps in recent months to improve the experience. Inside the company, Facebook has gone to great lengths to ensure that employees stay focused on mobile: At one point, product managers were prohibited from accessing the desktop version of Facebook internally, forcing them to use the mobile site instead, and the company has put up “Droidfooding” posters around campus encouraging employees to switch to Android to better understand the platform.
In Facebook’s fourth-quarter earnings report for 2012, Zuckerberg proclaimed that Facebook had officially become “a mobile company.” The really striking thing is that it appears to be true. Yes, Facebook still fumbles on mobile from time to time — as shown by the lackluster reception for Facebook Home — but the fact that it is paying attention to its mobile experience is certainly a step in the right direction.
Brain Drain
It’s not uncommon for businesses to experience an exodus of early hires and top execs after going public, but Facebook’s brain drain has been particularly noticeable. In just the first three months after filing its IPO, Facebook lost its CTO, platforms director and the head of its partnership marketing division.
Since then, Facebook has lost several other prominent employees including Joanna Shields, its VP of Europe, Middle East and Africa, its general counsel Ted Ullyot, product director Blake Ross and most recently, its longtime head of communications Larry Yu.
That said, Facebook has continued to poach top talent from other competitors in the tech space like Google and Apple, which is a positive sign.
A More Polished Zuckerberg
It’s not just Facebook that has changed; the company’s founder has changed, too. While Zuckerberg still dresses casually and talks about the hacker culture from time to time, he has been noticeably more polished when speaking in public post-IPO, whether it’s during an interview, a launch event or an earnings call. That’s certainly not a coincidence. As AllThingsD reported in September, Zuckerberg now has handlers who help him craft his words and public appearances. Now that Facebook is a public company, every word and gesture from Zuckerberg is scrutinized that much more. After all, there’s a lot of money riding on it.
2012, 
, and video sites.
